Those 13 Steam Machines might be cool, but they’re no different than any other gaming PC with the exception of dual-booting Steam OS. For a completely new take on the gaming PC, check out Razer’s Project Christine concept.

Razer calls it “The World’s Most Modular PC Design,” and you’ve got a pretty good idea how it works from looking at the picture above. There’s a towering PCI-Express backplane that attaches to a glowing base. On it are a series of proprietary connectors that allow owners to easily swap components in and out.

All the parts you’d traditionally purchase to install in a DIY rig are available: CPU, RAM, SSD and hard drive, optical drives, power supply, you name it. Some — like CPUs and storage — take up a single slot. Others occupy a pair of slots: the slick full-color touchscreen status display, for example. Christine’s PSU has a dedicated double-wide spot near the base.

While undeniably cool and clever, Christine is a bit of a paradox.

A machine like this is going to be very expensive. Any time you take a computer part and put it inside a vendor-specific enclosure, the price goes way up. That’s certainly true for caddy-mounted drive options for rackmount servers compared to their bare-drive equivalents.

If you’re limited to buying Christine’s components from Razer, they’ll come at a premium. There’s very little chance that Razer will sell a pluggable 16GB RAM module for the same price you can buy a 16GB performance DIMM kit, for example.

If a PC gamer is after the most bang for his or her buck, Christine isn’t a good option. And while Christine is modular, it’s nowhere near as customizable as a DIY PC. You’ll be limited to the modules Razer chooses to offer — you won’t be able to fit just any video card into those units.

Then again, Christine probably isn’t aimed at the DIY crowd. There’s still a good market for pre-built gaming PCs, and companies like Maingear make good money selling them. Christine might just be a better option for buyers who don’t want to deal with the hassle of assembling their own system but still want the kind of upgradeability a home build offers.

Even if Intel or AMD change CPU sockets again (and they will), Christine would be no trouble to upgrade. Presumably Razer would just offer up a new module that included the updated chip and socket on a board that still slots neatly into the tower.

On a traditional pre-built gaming rig, you’d have to yank out the mainboard and re-build — or buy a new system. Christine’s definitely a better alternative to that, even if there’s a slightly higher initial sticker price to deal with.